2024 Reading Confessional

Mostly in outdoor adventure contexts, there’s this idea of three types of fun. Type 1 fun is fun while it’s happening, and also afterwards. Type 2 is not fun while it’s happening, but makes a good story. Type 3 is not fun while it is happening and also doesn’t make a good story after. I first heard about this concept from this screenshot of an Google AI overview:

Here is a confession: in 2023, I did not finish a single book. My excuse for this, at least to myself, is that I’m in a PhD program and have been for a while. So I read a lot of scientific papers and some big chunks of technical manuals, but did not finish a single book. I think being in my doctoral program almost made me forget that not every written page takes two painful passes to parse. I was almost in danger of sympathizing with my students who refuse to read anything.

So, in 2024, I was genuinely very proud to finish a few books in their entirety. Two of them have some serious Third Type of Fun included. Here they are, in approximately chronological order:

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsey Gibson. I read it. I know my mom also at least attempted to read it, since it was sitting in the downstairs bathroom by the toilet in my family’s house for months. Her mom probably would have read it too, if it had been published while she was alive and cognizant to read it. It didn’t exactly solve all my problems, but it made me feel pleasantly seen for an evening. Probably a good bet for eldest daughters and former eldest daughters everywhere.

What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte. This seemed like an obvious read after JD Vance got chosen as VP. I’d read most of it previously back in 2018 when it was originally published, but never finished it. Katie and I had also driven through a chunk of Appalachia in late June on the way to a work conference of mine, so we had Appalachia on our minds. Huge fan of Elizabeth Catte!

I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt by Madeline Pendleton. I read this entire book in a day, the first day after I tested positive for Covid in August, and mostly before the brain fog set in. A healthy chunk of it isn’t exactly new advice for those of us used to living in this hellscape 24/7, but it might not be a bad gift for my younger sister in the future. It also motivated me to set up a chunk of money to automatically go out of my checking, into a different account, and to set up auto-pay on bills from that account after previously living by the “we’re too poor to have anything on auto-pay” philosophy. In 2025, we are paying bills on time! Say it back!

(Side note: what felt like five minutes after I finished the last page, the author Madeline got cancelled online. Despite looking into it, I’m honestly not quite sure what to think. I can’t help but feel like her greatest sin remains simply being a vintage reseller. If anyone does have the magic skeleton key to what is going on here, I am interested…)

The Terror by Dan Simmons. This book gets some mixed reviews. It was my first pass at The Terror (I had not yet watched the TV show), and I read it absolutely engrossed like I haven’t read anything since I was in the “reading Warrior Cats books instead of sleeping” stage of my life. It had a lot of cool, interesting historical and nautical details. It also had some not-so cool and totally fabricated details about Indigenous peoples, among other stereotypes. It definitely feels like it was written in 2007. I also, frankly, expected more cannibalism content. That all being said, I ate those 800 pages right up in under a week.

Also, I got curious about Simmons's politics about midway through the book, which I started to feel like he had a huge, weird crush on Francis Crozier (around the point where he goes on at length about how Crozier is a perfectly steady shot despite being drunk as a skunk and out in -50 degree cold). Unfortunately but predictably, I immediately found out that he’s a right-wing shithead, now even more than he was back in 2007. Ugh.

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I just finished this last night. Since it’s New Years Eve when I’m writing this, this will almost certainly be the last book I read this year. It’s super short and pretty easy sailing (it was originally a magazine article, which was built out into a short book). I was a little apprehensive going into it, since I had just seen some folks online discussing it negatively. The passage that people did not like was on page 4, where Kimmerer writes [of Indigenous people in North America] that “instead of changing the land to suit their convenience, they changed themselves.” I suspect that this was perhaps not meant to mean literally that Indigenous people never changed their environments, but that they made more of an effort to live harmoniously with nature. Broadly, I felt convinced by the main argument of this book: that a gift-giving economy that fosters community and connection could be an antidote to our current extractive system.

(Another sidenote: I also saw some people online speculating that the cover image was AI-generated. I feel that this is also almost certainly not true: the illustrator, John Burgoyne, is listed in the back of the book, and his work is primarily traditional watercolors and pen/pencil work of similar subjects).

Honorable Mention: Wasteland Pony Express by Katie Aki (i.e., my lovely wife and better half). Pony Express is not exactly a finished novel, although it easily could be by length! It’s the ongoing interactive fiction project of my wife, of which I am occasionally the (minimally helpful) beta reader. It’s 200k+ words of lesbian post-apocalyptic fiction following a little 5ft nothing Pony Express rider and lesbian loser, Lou. She’s been on a 300-mile journey to the coast with a poorly-behaved package in the form of a young woman, Holiday Bell, who is doing her damnedest to be a mail-order bride. It’s fun, in a Third Kind of Fun way for the girls involved. It’s sexy, although again, probably mostly agonizing for Lou et al. And it’s been a huge part of our lives all year! These days, our hobbies include discussing things like “what kind of lip balm would Lou use, and why is it Carmex original?” and “how quickly could this journey have been completed if they had a car?” (Answer: 5 hours driving directly). Also, if any of you are wishing for more cannibalism content than Dan Simmons could cope with, the companion piece to Pony Express, Care and Keeping, has got you. It’s got you more than you could possibly imagine.

I’ve got a couple other books which I’m partway into at the moment, both related to being absolutely Franklin Expedition-pilled: May We Be Spared to Meet on Earth: Letters of the Lost Franklin Arctic Expedition, and The Ministry of Time. I’ve also got a copy of Braiding Sweetgrass which I received as a Christmas present, which I have promised my grandmother I’ll read promptly. I’ve bought myself some cute bookmarks, and I’m hopeful I’ll have a longer reading list in 2025.